Someday we’ll have streets to walk in that aren’t covered with snow, ice, and puddles for a third of the year. Until then, I’m going to be looking for glimpses of beauty where I can find it, even when each step is a strategic move in some weird obstacle course @cityofminneapolis has set up to keep me agile and/or bitter.
Our snow-clearance for cars is an annual beautifully coordinated earth-moving endeavor up there with any other massive societal undertaking. We know how to build transportation networks that drain, how to keep them clear and dry. We just need to political and social will to offer this kind of infrastructure to people on foot and using wheelchairs and canes, people biking, people with carts and strollers.

Something about lichen is reminding me of darning or vice versa. 😍 I can’t tell if it’s the palette or the season or the nubbly imperfect textures but each pleases me more than it ought in its invocation of the other.
Thank heavens for ashy blues and gold on thick bark. Thank heavens for wool sweaters.

It's mid-March and all my winter socks are worn thin, last year's darns felted flat and melded into the colorful patterns around them. Instead of knitting, I've started carrying mending wherever I go, the lengthening days my cue to repair what a winter of walking has laid bare.
I wear my boots a little big; air and wool buffered me as I did my ice walking and tromping and sliding and lumbering. But the cost of air-as-warmth is socks that wear out faster. This pair was a thrift store reject that I pulled from the recycling bin already threadbare. This round of darning is perhaps the third I've done on them, and my repairs are starting to layer, to becomes their own geology, striated sediment with strength formed and tested and undone under the pressure and movement of each step I take.
One of the many joys of seasonal weather is its inbuilt novelty, including sartorial. I love opening the stacked boxes of winter clothes, a whole wardrobe I've forgotten. The same wool sweaters I tire of now, begin to find drab and loathsome, become a care package from my past self, little surprises in each corner, folded into fabrics. Mending is such a simple act that it's easy to forget about it, both the doing and the having done it especially in the thralls of seasons changing. It's also an act, inherently, of care and intention, like the best gifts.
When I see my patches, they evoke the warmth of being both gift-giver and recipient, of feeling cared for and of caring, like self-love somehow externalized and voiced, echoed back, surround sound. These socks say, in every imperfect knob and stitch, that I am loving and loved. (All yarns/threads/supplies secondhand.)

I shared a photo of this tree a few weeks ago, its branches like deep night against the city’s evening skyline. But the days are longer now and walking to a meeting yesterday was a circuitous route of my usual cross-parking-lot shortcuts and almost-spring chase-the-light dalliances. I gave myself permission to be slightly late, a concession to the part of me adamant that we shouldn’t schedule indoor meetings at sunset (c.f. the sky). I was particularly taken with the sharp low sun reflecting off a building back onto rising steam, order projected onto the organic and uncontainable. I tried to capture it, mine the only footprints across a parking lot to nowhere. It struck me as I chased that mirage, and as I looked at my photos later, how much perspective shifts with even minor movement, even with a scene so far away. The absence or presence, the entire quality of light, is a function of a few inches here, a few feet there.
This route is the most solitary I take regularly, zigzagging across the edges of humanity: highways and parking ramps and parking lots, places built by humans to be abandoned, the cathedrals of the anti-social and icons of isolation. As much as I hate what they represent, I love hopping fences in a dress to cut a quarter mile off my route—it is both illicit and intimate, as shortcuts and nicknames so often are.
The tenderness I feel is for my wounded city. The pleasure I take in knowing it and seeing it and sharing it is a fraction of the hope I have for it to heal. At some point, our idolatry will cease; the parking lots and highways will fill back in with communities and streetlife. The reductive barrenness of fossil fuels will be knit back together by apartment buildings and bus stops, boulevard trees and tiny shops and footsteps. We'll return, fully, like crows finally coming home to roost. (For the timekeepers, somehow I still managed to walk in the door only a minute past 6, the warm hum of conversation and smell of tamales the welcome antithesis of Washington Avenue. I regret nothing.)

Happifyers: people who are just pure sunshine and share that light with everyone around them! So blessed to spend the day with my beautiful daughter- she is the sunshine in my life, always a bright rainbow sharing her beauty with those around her! You know she gave me bunny ears in almost every pic we took together today!? Hah! What is your source of light and how do you share your sunshine with others? #getoutside#letyourlightshine#makeitcount#happify#choosehappy#happyisachoice#bethesunshine

Today’s thing-finding ice walk: sunglasses, this lovely hefty metal thing, as well as one pine cone, one candle (neither shown), one plastic bag (to trash), and one throwing toy (out of lake to tree for use by park goers). And one sunset that had me walking backwards, feet sinking down into the slush covering the (hopefully still thick!) ice of the lake.
If they’re your sunglasses, let me know!

After I sent a first round of sketches to a client yesterday, I threw on my boots just in time for sunset and water carving its way through ice and favorite trees and the perfect arc of snow being rolled up like sod.

To walk in an American city is to somehow bear the collective sins of an entire culture, to be seen, simultaneously, as both pariah and saint. Oil spilled from cars floats on the giant moat-like puddles we have to splash through to get anywhere in recent days of unseasonably warm weather. It's a constant reminder of our own fragility and mortality, oil and water a part of our rituals of death and purification, anointing and cleansing, loss and redemption.
I want to lay paper flat on the toxic sheen of each intersection, print it with the excess oil we use to anoint our dying species. I want to marble paper, to study its mesmerizing patterns, to read it like tea leaves, and then burn it, an effigy, a sacrifice, the letters of that lover who was incapable of love. I want to worry the ashes between my fingers and see if that grit feels more like funeral or phoenix.

This is your heads up that talenti ice cream is on sale through tomorrow (2 for $5? 2 for $6?) at the Wedge. For those who need a nudge to switch to a more climate friendly way of shopping and diet, pick up a few containers for a last new-plastic/dairy hurrah, and then start your rock and roll bulk shopping lifestyle! (You can also check with friends/family and thrift stores to find secondhand/more sustainable reusable containers for bulk shopping if you’ve already transitioned away from new plastic and carbon-heavy foods.) My offer to meet up to shop bulk still stands, of course! Nothing feels like abundance quite like rows of varieties of beautiful beans and spices and grains in the cupboards!

It’s splashy out. Of my too-many interests, one that’s been on my mind is how sidewalks and crosswalks aren’t designed to drain. At all. It’s an especially odd oversight for a city like Minneapolis, where water isn’t just in our name (“mni” is Dakota for “water”) but in our tagline (“city of lakes”) and in our daily conversations about weather.
This sidewalk was adjacent Fair Oaks Park, a particularly rare combo of water over ice over water, so each step was a splash/crack/float sensation. It made for the most kinetically interesting portion of my walk, but amusement parks and transportation networks are two different beasts. And even amusement parks have sidewalks to get between the thrill rides.
With our climate crisis, Minneapolis is likely to see increased freeze-thaw as we cycle more frequently between above and below freezing temperatures through the winter. Some studies suggest we might also start experiencing even more severe and prolonged sub-Arctic temps as the Arctic oscillation shifts, pushing us into the range where sidewalk salt stops melting ice effectively.
For a city whose identity is so tied in to its water in all forms, our lack of attention to drainage is a glaring omission, once you start paying attention. There’s no easy solution when you realize the utility of your extensive walking network is predicated on warm desert conditions, but at least we could start talking about it!

The last few photos from yesterday’s snow walk, trees along Nicollet just before the snow slowed and the wind started picking up. Today’s walk involved a lot more leaping and fording and pausing to stare at giant puddles as I plot a crossing strategy—the sidewalks even on major community corridors like Lake Street were nearly impassable.
Personally, I like the feeling that I’ve been in training all year to make it to the grocery store with my backpack of bottles to refill—I’m pretty sure this is how Olympic sports are born. But that kind of walking ought to be optional in a city; cross-training shouldn’t be required to do one’s Sunday errands. We can’t improve on our beautiful snowy views, but we sure as heck can do better at clearing our icy and snowy sidewalks.

I figured out a few days ago that I’ve walked over 500 miles just in Hennepin Avenue in the last year. I added a few more yesterday. The huge electric lines by the river were literally buzzing in the fast falling snow and beneath them I was too, metaphorically, happy to be of this world.